Pursue School Improvement Through Persuasion
Pursue School Improvement Through Persuasion, Not Vilification
Rick Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the Education Week opinion blog “Rick Hess Straight Up.”
I’m working on my new book (tentatively titled The Great School Rethink). It’ll be out next spring from Harvard Education Press and aims to help educational leaders meet the challenges of the post-pandemic landscape. To the surprise of none of my regular readers, I suggest that doing this well is less about “innovation” than helping parents, teachers, and policymakers get comfortable thinking about schooling differently.
That’s a tall order in a world where education reforms routinely crash in the face of reservations, routine, and resistance. Yet, it’s a challenge that educational leaders should be well-equipped to tackle. After all, educators are experienced at helping others see new things, master new ideas, and wrestle with uncomfortable questions.
Unfortunately, the track record when it comes to school change is heavy on haranguing or preaching to the choir and light on persuasion. And it’s no great surprise (especially in a polarized era) that neither haranguing opponents nor talking to the like-minded is likely to change minds or locate common ground.
There are better paths. They start with taking a deep breath and mustering all our patience. After all, research shows that changing minds is always a slog. If parents or teachers have deep-seated notions about how schools should work or what classrooms should look like, it’s always going to be tough to get them comfortable with another tack.
As my old boss, Harvard’s Arthur Brooks has put it, “If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon and start offering them as a gift.” In fact, researchers have long known that insulting someone in the course of an argument leads them to dig in their heels and oppose you more firmly. This phenomenon even has a name: the “boomerang effect.”
Fight the temptation to shout “you’re wrong!” at doubters and then just repeat your talking points, slower and louder. Instead, try to listen, appreciate the concerns, and invite them in. Rather than approaching school improvement as a morality play, approach the act of persuasion as a chance to more fully think through and explain what you’re doing.
Brooks has known a number of religious missionaries and notes that they routinely have their core beliefs rejected at doorstep after doorstep and yet manage to remain remarkably cheerful. (He tells of the missionary who wryly observed, “No one ever said, ‘Great news: There are missionaries on the porch.’”). Brooks asks, “What explains this apparent dissonance? The answer is that effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift.”
Avoid “othering” others. Ensure that those who disagree or have doubts don’t feel like they’re off the team. If you’re rethinking teacher roles or the use of school time, don’t force those comfortable with the status quo to see themselves as outcasts under siege. Watch your language, keep lines of communication open, and take every opportunity to extend a hand to those who aren’t on board. One benefit of this approach is that it gives you a chance to build trust with your opponents, which can make things easier with time.
Don’t take rejection personally (or as final). Hesitance and reluctance are normal. They’re healthy. If anything, they’re useful warning signs as to where the community really is. Take them that way. A big mistake education reformers have habitually made—in so many efforts like No Child Left Behind or the Common Core—is they ride roughshod over doubts and concerns. Too often, this yields a “with me or against me” mindset, which turns fence-sitting doubters into sworn enemies.
And listen more, much more. One of the things I realized when Pedro Noguera and I wrote our book A Search for Common Ground a few years back is how easy it is to approach conversation mostly as a chance to convince the listener that “I’m right.” It struck me that we too rarely appreciate that the opportunity to listen, by illuminating shared values and perspectives, is what ultimately helps us persuade. In fact, researchers at Yale and UC Berkeley have found that deep listening is more powerful than talking when it comes to changing minds.
One of the great disappointments of my professional life is how frequently champions of educational change seem to imagine that the way to win hearts and minds is to vilify their opponents. Yet, all those efforts—on both left and right—have one thing in common. They haven’t led to much actual change, in public sentiment or in schools. Perhaps it’s a good time to try a different tack.
Linda Darling-Hammond—the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University, and routinely at the top of the leader board in the annual RHSU Edu-Scholar rankings—has been awarded the 2022 Yidan Prize for Education Research. The $3.9 million prize, arguably the world’s most prestigious education award, credited Linda’s scholarship with “reveal[ing] the diverse ways children learn and how best to teach them—and feed[ing] those insights into robust educator development programs and transformed schools.” While Linda and I have disagreed plenty over the years, I’ve great respect for her remarkable contributions. So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to ask her a few questions about her work, the award, and the issues of the day.
Rick: Congratulations, Linda. It’s a well-deserved honor. For starters, can you say a few words about how you came to focus on the kinds of issues—like professional development and teacher preparation—for which you are honored?
Linda: Thanks, Rick. I became interested in teacher learning because of my own experiences as a high school English teacher. I fell into teaching after college, entering through an alternate-route intern program in Philadelphia that placed me in a full-time teaching position after just a few weeks of student-teaching during the summer. While I had taught in an urban after-school program during college, I quickly realized how underprepared I was to meet the needs of all my students—including high schoolers who could not yet read. The professional development I experienced was limited and unhelpful. While I was enthusiastic and hardworking, and the students liked me well enough, I could not find the knowledge base for teaching that I was desperately seeking at that time. When I met some extraordinary teachers and began to study how they had learned to teach, and conducted research on teacher preparation at RAND and, later, at Teachers College, Columbia University, I discovered a deep knowledge base that few teachers could access. I determined then to work on understanding high-quality preparation for teachers and figuring out how it could become widespread.
Rick: You’ve shown a remarkable ability to straddle the worlds of academia and government. You’ve served as president of the California board of education, chaired the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, helmed Obama’s education transition team in 2008, and Biden’s transition team in 2020. What have you learned from these roles?
Linda: As you know, there is a deep divide between research and practice and an even deeper divide between research and policy. That schism became apparent during the last years of No Child Left Behind, a topic about which you and I penned a joint op-ed as the law’s implementation became more and more dysfunctional. As I have engaged in the policy process, I have learned more about the constraints and considerations policymakers have to take into account and what it takes to get past infatuation with a single silver bullet to actually build a thoughtful system of supports and incentives. At the Learning Policy Institute, my colleagues and I seek to understand how to bring solid evidence to the policy arena, particularly in ways that are evidence-based, easy to understand, and practical for policymakers. That is a huge translation task that requires regular engagement and communication with respect on both sides.
Linda: In many places, professional development has been designed as a torturous “sit and get” event where some outsider comes in and talks at tired teachers, who are meant to simply listen: one of the most ineffective approaches to learning. Of course, more effective approaches exist. My LPI colleagues and I screened the literature for high-quality studies that found professional-development models that changed teacher practice and enabled student-learning gains. We found that these models had a number of features in common: They were based in the curriculum content being taught; engaged teachers in active learning as teachers tried out the practices they would use; offered models of the practices with lessons, assignments, and coaching; extended over time (typically at least 50 hours of interaction over a number of months) with iterative opportunities to try things in the classroom and continue to refine. In addition, these efforts were almost always accompanied by in-person or on-line coaching, sometimes using classroom videos as the grist for those conversations.
Rick: On a related note, what do you think of the state of teacher preparation today? Do you think it has improved over the past couple decades—and is there any way to really know?
Linda: I think a solid group of teacher-preparation programs have been improving since at least the late 1980s, when the Holmes Group of Deans and the National Network for Educational Renewal worked with flagship universities and other committed colleges to design a new model—a coherent, content-rich program linking students to partner schools demonstrating state-of-the-art practice for training and engaging candidates in a full year of graduated responsibility with expert mentors. This supports school and university improvement at the same time. However, there has been no policy support for this work for the last 20 years or for the training costs of prospective teachers, and teacher salaries have declined since the early 1990s. As a result, the quality of teacher education has grown more variable as shortages have grown, and many programs have been designed to cut corners to get teachers into classrooms quickly.
Rick: As the Yidan Prize Foundation noted, you’ve spent a career as a leading voice for equity. It seems to me that one ensuing challenge is how to ensure that a healthy concern for equity doesn’t morph into an unhealthy disdain for the notion of excellence. How do you think about this issue? How do you advise practitioners and policymakers to proceed on that count?
Linda: I think equity has to be all about excellence: Equity involves getting all students access to excellent teaching and rigorous, rich, relevant learning opportunities. It means helping students learn as much as they can, developing their particular passions and interests, and meeting their needs along the way. Equity, however, is not about standardization—doing exactly the same thing with or for all students. We now know from the science of learning and development that most of human potential is constructed by the relationships and experiences people have throughout their lives, not assumed at birth. Given that students come to school with different experiences, starting points, and ways of learning, the teaching and learning process has to be personalized to a great extent. Sometimes this may mean expert use of collaboration and differentiation within the classroom. Sometimes it may mean intensive tutoring at key moments to help students accelerate their learning. It may mean after-school and summer school learning opportunities. It should never mean holding back some students from opportunities in favor of equal outcomes. Instead, it should always mean leveling up the opportunities to learn so that we have more accomplished, contributing members of society.
Linda: I would encourage educators and policymakers to use this moment of deep disruption to reinvent the way we do school: to move beyond the assembly-line factory model we inherited 100 years ago to new models that are more flexible, equitable, and successful. Innovators have created many new designs that allow for more personalized and experiential learning; stronger relationships among teachers, students, and families; time for teachers to collaborate around curriculum, teaching, and decision making; and competency-based approaches that vary time and methods—from high-intensity tutoring to creative uses of technology—rather than accepting disparate outcomes along a bell curve. To get to this new future, schools of education should partner with such innovative schools for training up the teachers and leaders of the future. Policymakers should remove the constraints and regulations that were designed to prop up the factory model. They should work to ensure resources are supporting well-prepared educators who can innovate and make good decisions for children, rather than trying to micromanage schools themselves.
To Combat Learning Loss, Schools Need to Overhaul the Industrial-Age Paradigm
The devastating picture presented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress has occasioned a lot of discussion about what it’ll take to overcome two years of pandemic disruption, which followed a decade of stagnant academic achievement. Well, Joel Rose, the CEO and co-founder of New Classrooms, argues that the most important thing we can do is overhaul the “industrial paradigm” of schooling. I’ve known Joel for close to 15 years and have long found him an interesting thinker and New Classrooms an intriguing model. When he offered to share some thoughts on what schools need to do, I decided to take him up on it. Here’s what he had to say.
The headlines were hard to read: NAEP’s assessment of the nation’s 4th and 8th graders revealed that the pandemic wiped out years of learning gains.
Troubling as that may be, the news still largely ignores what was true before the pandemic, when only 11 out of 25 students in a nationally representative 4th grade classroom would have been deemed “proficient” in math—and when only six would remain proficient by graduation.
Addressing what to do about that requires reckoning with the larger question: Why did movements over the last two decades to raise standards, improve educator quality, upgrade curriculum, enable choice, leverage assessment, instill accountability, and increase funding appear to have such a limited impact on college and career readiness?
That approach, where groups of same-aged students all learn the same thing at the same time with a teacher and (usually) a textbook, was advanced more than a century ago as a means to rank and sort students into different life pathways—effectively a timed, academic obstacle course with real-life implications.
First, it’s unforgiving to those who fall behind. What’s taught is based on one’s age, not what they know. Stumble for any reason, like a pandemic, and it can be hard to catch back up—especially in cumulative subjects like math.
Second, what a student experiences in school is limited by the capacity of the teacher. Like many teachers, I tried to meet each of my students’ unique needs, to design and deliver engaging lessons, to thoughtfully review their classwork and homework, to stay in close communication with parents, and more. That’s what students, families, and taxpayers deserve. But I simply didn’t have the time or resources to sustainably do that.
If meaningful improvement in our overall educational system could be achieved without tinkering with the industrial paradigm itself, we probably would have seen it by now. Yes, the reforms that animated the last two decades can all make a difference. But if national pre-pandemic proficiency gains of 2 percentage points per decade is the best one could hope for, it will take at least a century before the vast majority of students graduate college- and career-ready.
There are undoubtedly better ways of “doing school” in the 21st century than what the 19th century architects of the industrial paradigm classroom conceived. Learning today can be more personalized, more reflective of the science of learning, more sustaining for educators, more reflective of what local communities are seeking, and—most importantly—more impactful for students. But those new approaches need to be designed and scaled.
To help lay out a path forward, New Classrooms (the organization I lead) partnered with Transcend, an organization that supports schools in implementing new learning models, to release a new report called Out of the Box: How Innovative Learning Models Can Transform K-12 Education. The report centers on the role of model providers: organizations that design more modern approaches to teaching and learning and then support the adoption of those approaches in partnership with like-minded local school communities.
Model providers do not run schools. They are more akin to curriculum organizations that reimagine what students experience when they come to school. But because the models these organizations create can so deeply shape what students experience, both model providers and school operators can share in the responsibility for student outcomes.
Several organizations have been working to bring about the model provider sector. Our own work has centered on developing Teach to One 360, a proof point for what an innovative learning model can be. It uses a diagnostic assessment to generate a precise, personalized math curriculum for middle and high school students that adapts throughout the school year based on individual progress. Most uniquely, 360 then integrates a combination of teacher-led, collaborative, and independent lessons as well as a first-of-its-kind scheduling algorithm so that each day, students access the lessons and peer groups that will best support their progress. (Note: 360 will relaunch in 2023, but an all-digital version called Teach to One Roadmaps is being used in schools today.)
Our experience has helped us understand the conditions required for schools to transition to a student-centered paradigm. It also illuminated the acute barriers that make it harder for more schools to get there. These include underinvestment in educational research and development, inertia within schools and districts that limits innovation, and education policies—most notably around assessment and accountability—that incentivize keeping the industrial paradigm intact.